There’s a moment in every great con when the marks realize they’ve been had. We’ve reached that moment with artificial intelligence, though many haven’t awakened to it yet.

Karen Hao’s devastating exposé “Empire of AI” pulls back the curtain on what may be the most audacious power gambit in tech history. Behind the seductive rhetoric of “AI for humanity” lies a different reality: a new form of digital colonialism built on the backs of exploited workers, powered by scraped resources, and sustained by brazen deception.

Listen to Sam Altman as he spins his yarn: “Our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity,” he adds, “Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp,” painting visions of a world where everyone will have “access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine.”

Yet when pressed about his own creation, Altman’s mask lowers. “What I lose the most sleep over is the hypothetical idea that we already have done something really bad by launching ChatGPT,” he admits. More tellingly, he once quipped: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” The casualness with which he discusses human extinction while celebrating profit reveals everything about Silicon Valley’s priorities.

Even Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” has seriously questioned their own wisdom in in the uncontrolled race to AGI: “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he has admitted. Hinton’s reflections grew darker upon his resignation from Google: “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”

The Whistleblowers They Silenced

The AI industry’s most credible critics aren’t outside agitators—they’re the researchers who built these systems and were cast out for telling uncomfortable truths. Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, who led Google’s AI ethics team before being fired, warned that “large language models entrenched social inequalities partly because of corporations’ decisions to prioritize size over safety.”

Their crime? Publishing research that punctured the AI bubble. As Mitchell observes, “Tech companies have been claiming that these large models have reasoning and comprehension abilities, and show ‘emergent’ learned capabilities,” when the reality is far more prosaic. These systems are pattern-matching machines dressed up as digital gods.

Gebru, in particular, saw through the con early. When OpenAI was first announced as a nonprofit claiming they would “save humanity from the dangers of AI,” she was furious, noting it was “eight white guys, one white woman and one Asian woman in Silicon Valley, all with the same expertise in deep learning plus Peter Thiel and Elon Musk” presuming to control humanity’s future.

The Exploited and the Extractors

Multiple investigations, including a major TIME report from January 2023 and CBS News “60 Minutes” coverage, have confirmed that Kenyan workers were paid less than $2 per hour to perform data labeling work for AI companies. Documents show OpenAI agreed to pay the outsourcing company Sama $12.50 per hour per worker – meaning Sama kept the majority of the payment.

As researchers note, “AI colonialism exercises necropolitical logic by determining which human populations and environmental ecosystems are valuable and which are disposable.”

The scope of this extraction is staggering. “The full English-language internet being fed into these models — books, scientific articles, all of the intellectual property that has been created” — all stolen without consent or compensation. Meanwhile, “massive supercomputers that run tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of computer chips that are the size of dozens, maybe hundreds, of football fields and use practically the entire energy demands of cities” drain resources from vulnerable communities.

The Surveillance Capitalist’s Endgame

Harvard’s Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term “surveillance capitalism,” warned us what was coming. “The essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us,” she wrote. Now we see the endgame: “Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world’s information.”

The AI revolution isn’t democratizing intelligence—it’s concentrating unprecedented power. As security expert Bruce Schneier warns: “The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign. When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI, we get AI that tends to reflect the interests of tech billionaires and corporations, instead of the public.”

The Fractured Brotherhood

Even the AI industry’s founding fathers can’t maintain their facade of noble purpose. Elon Musk, OpenAI’s co-founder and proponent as a counter to what he preached were Google’s “evil” AI intentions, now calls Altman “a swindler” and accuses OpenAI of betraying its mission. “The ‘open’ in OpenAI is supposed to mean open source and it was created as a nonprofit open source. And now it is a closed source for maximum profit,” Musk rails, conveniently forgetting his own role in the transformation.

When Dario and Daniela Amodei (key fixtures in OpenAI’s early GPT development) broke away to form Anthropic, it was supposedly because of OpenAI’s race to profit at the expense of safety. Anthropic quickly joined the race, acting much like the company they left.

These often-public feuds reveal the hollow core of Silicon Valley’s rhetoric. When Altman recently told Musk, “I realize, what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role I hope you’ll mostly put [America] first,” he inadvertently admitted that corporate interests have been driving the AI agenda all along.

The Alternative They Don’t Want You to See

The tragedy is that genuine artificial intelligence could enhance human flourishing—just not the version Silicon Valley is selling us. As Gebru and Mitchell argue, “Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices” rather than chasing imaginary superintelligence.

Other models exist. “Models can be small and task-specific, their training data contained and knowable, ridding the incentives for widespread exploitative and psychologically harmful labor practices,” as demonstrated by alternative approaches in places like New Zealand.

But such models don’t promise world domination or trillion-dollar valuations. They threaten the very empire these digital conquistadors are building.

The Reckoning

As Zuboff presciently observed, “We are at the beginning of this story, not the end.” The AI empire’s contradictions are becoming impossible to ignore: promises of liberation built on exploitation, claims of democratization enforcing concentration, visions of safety delivered through recklessness.

The question isn’t whether artificial intelligence will transform society—it already has. The question is whether we’ll allow a handful of tech executives to shape that transformation according to their imperial ambitions, or whether we’ll demand something better: AI systems that actually serve humanity rather than harvesting it.

The con is nearly complete, but it’s not too late to walk away from the table. We just need the courage to admit we’re being played.

Where Do We Go from Here?

For decades, both Selling Power and Sales 3.0 have been working to elevate the B2B sales industry, including both its professional and ethical standards. Now, those gains are in danger of being obliterated faster than you can say “ChatGPT.” Within the sales industry, as with many others, FOMO is spreading, leading to all-too-common sentiments like, better get on board or be left behind. But left behind where, and what exactly are we getting on board for? 

We are acting like we can do nothing about AI. But, we can, for we, in fact, are the consumers. We have the power, and obligation, to push back on AI developers, to demand ethically produced and delivered products and solutions. That’s why we have created a research arm that will be ranking AI solutions on various ethical standards, to be released in research reports, white papers, and our AI Sales Summits, beginning with the presentation of our first AI-4-Sales EQI (ethical quality index) at our September Summit. The good news is that you can register for FREE today.

Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO of Selling Power and creator of the Sales 3.0 Conference, and Jeff Campbell, the company’s longtime COO, lead the organization’s mission to empower sales leaders through media, events, and AI-driven performance strategies.